by Seneca
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oxford world’s classics
SIX TRAGEDIES
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born some time between 1 bce
and 4 ce, in Corduba, in southern Spain, to a Roman equestrian
family. Seneca’s father (‘Seneca the Elder’) had a successful rhet-
orical career, and educated his sons in Rome, in rhetoric and phil-
osophy. Seneca was a life-long adherent to Stoic philosophy.
In the year 41 ce Caligula was murdered, and Claudius took over
as emperor. Soon after the new ruler’s accession Caligula’s sister,
Julia, was accused of committing adultery with Seneca. They were
tried before the Senate and sentenced to death, but Claudius altered
the sentence to exile. Seneca was sent to Corsica, where he spent the
next eight years, and where several of his prose works were probably
written. Perhaps many or most of the tragedies were written on
Corsica. Seneca was brought back to Rome in 49 ce through the
intercession of Agrippina, who wanted a tutor for her son Nero.
On Nero’s accession in 54 ce Seneca became a very powerful
man. He was Nero’s speechwriter, and perhaps political adviser.
Along with the praetorian prefect Burrus, he may have been respon-
sible for the relative restraint of Nero’s early years as emperor. Their
power diminished after 59 ce when they refused to help Nero
kill his mother, Agrippina. In the early 60s ce Seneca officially
retired from pu blic life. In 65 ce there was a plan to assassinate the
emperor the (‘Pisonian Conspiracy’). Nero accused Seneca of
involvement in the plot and forced him to commit suicide; he died
in a hot steam-bath.
Emily Wilson is Associate Professor in Classical studies at the
University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mocked with Death:
Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (2004) and The Death of
Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007).
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
SENECA
Six Tragedies
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
EMILY WILSON
1
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1
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CONTENTS
Introduction
vii
Note on the Text and Translation
xxvii
Select Bibliography
xxix
Chronology
xxxiii
Mythological Family Trees
xxxiv
PHAEDRA
1
OEDIPUS
39
MEDEA
71
TROJAN WOMEN
103
HERCULES FURENS
139
THYESTES
179
Explanatory Notes
213
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INTRODUCTION
Biography and History
Seneca’s tragedies are intense. They show us people who push
themselves too far, beyond the limits of ordinary behaviour and emo-
tion. Passion is constantly set against reason, and passion wins out:
as Seneca’s Phaedra asks: ‘What can reason do? Passion, passion
rules’ (184). Seneca’s characters are obsessed and destroyed by their
emotions: they are dominated by rage, ambition, lust, jealousy,
desire, anger, grief, madness, and fear. The literary style of these
plays, too, is intense: they use dense, witty, hyperbolic language and
imagery to evoke an endless struggle for more and more absolute
power.
Seneca’s tragedies reflect the emotional and political intensity of
the time in which they were written. Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a
contemporary of Jesus, born some time between 1 bce and 4 ce.1 He
lived in one of the most interesting and dangerous periods of Roman
history, under the emperors Tiberius, Gaius (Caligula), Claudius,
and Nero. The Roman Republic was long dead. Over the course of
Seneca’s lifetime the empire expanded, while Rome’s rulers grew
ever more corrupt.
; Seneca was born in Corduba, in southern Spain, at a distance from
Rome, the centre of imperial power, and both his parents had also
been born in Spain. Seneca’s tragedies have many passages that
evoke the vast size of the Roman empire: lists of the most far-flung
regions lying at or beyond the borders of Roman power. The fact
that Seneca came from an outlying part of the empire may have made
him particularly aware of the scale of Roman dominance in the west-
ern world of his time.
But Corduba was not a provincial backwater; it was an important
centre of Roman culture. Moreover, Seneca came from a privileged,
educated, and wealthy background. His family was upper class,
belonging to the equestrian order. Equestrians (or ‘knights’ — the
word literally suggests horse-rider or cavalryman) were traditionally
1 The best overview of Seneca’s life, and his interactions with the political circum-
stances of his times, is Miriam Griffin’s Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (Clarendon
Press, 1976).
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viii
introduction
focused on business rather than politics — in contrast to senatorial
families, but Seneca was to rise to enormous political prominence.
According to Tacitus, one of our main sources for this period,
Seneca expressed to Nero, towards the end of his life, his amazement
at his own social rise: ‘Am I, born of an equestrian father in the prov-
inces, actually numbered among the leaders of the state? Has my
newcomer presence achieved distinction amongst noblemen who can
put on display a long series of glittering decorations?’2 But there is
some rhetorical disingenuousness in the implication that Seneca’s
rise to prominence from humble family origins was due entirely to
the benevolence of the emperor Nero. In fact his success owed a great
deal both to his own literary talent and to the influence of his family.
Seneca did not come from nowhere.
Seneca’s father (‘Seneca the Elder’) had a successful rhetorical
career. He spent most of his life in Rome, studying oratory. He wrote
a history of Rome (which has not survived), and also two sets of
textbook examples of rhetorical exercises, called the Suasoriae
(Persuasions) and Controversiae (Controversial Issues), sections of
which are extant. These were written at the request of his sons,
towards the end of his life.
Seneca the Elder had three sons; Lucius Annaeus was the middle
child. Their father brought all three to Rome to be educated. All the
brothers became intimately involved, in very different ways, with the
workings of Roman imperial power. The elder brother, Annaeus
Novatus, became the governor of southern Greece. He is mentioned
in Acts (18: 12 – 16), since it was under his rule that the Jews brought
an accusation against Paul for persuading people to ‘worship God
contrary to the law’. Annaeus Novatus, referred to in Acts under the
name Gallio, dismissed the case, arguing that the issue was a matter
of religious law, outside the realm of Roman legislation.
The youngest brother, Annaeus Mela, did not undertake an official
political career. He became a successful businessman, and eventually
helped to manage Nero’s finances. He was the father of the poet
Lucan — author of the Civil War, a great Republican epic poem
about the war between Julius Caesar and Pompey.
We do not know much detail about the life of Lucius Annaeus
Seneca, the middle brother, as a teenager and young man. These
must have been the years in which he was educated in rhetoric.
2 Tacitus, Annals 14. 53: trans. J. C. Yardley, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford
University Press, 2008), 330.
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introduction
ix
The influence of Roman rhetorical training is evident in all of his
work. He also trained with several different tutors in philosophy. A
Stoic named Attalus emphasized the importance of ascetic habits: he
recommended always sleeping on a hard bed, and avoiding luxurious
foods such as oysters and mushrooms. Seneca became a life-long
adherent to Stoic philosophy.3 He also studied at the school of
Quintus Sextus, another primarily Stoic philosopher. From Sextus
he seems to have learnt the moral practice of daily self-examination.
He also became a vegetarian, but was talked out of it after only a year
by his father, who thought the meatless diet was weakening his son’s
health.
Seneca’s health was certainly bad. He was a lifelong sufferer from
chest problems, which may have been caused by cardiac asthma or
angina. In his Epistle 78 to Lucilius, Seneca tells the story of how, in
his early years, he was able to ‘adopt a defiant attitude to sickness’:
But eventually I succumbed to it altogether. Reduced to a state of complete
emaciation, I had arrived at a point where the catarrhal discharges were
virtually carrying me away with them altogether. On many an occasion
I felt an urge to cut my life short there and then, and was only held back
by the thought of my father, who had been the kindest of fathers to me
and was then in his old age. Having in mind not how bravely I was capable
of dying but how far from bravely he was capable of bearing the loss,
I commanded myself to live. There are times when even to live is an act
of bravery.4
After this episode, which perhaps took place when he was in his
twenties, Seneca seems to have recuperated in Egypt. His aunt —
his mother’s stepsister — was the wife of the prefect of Egypt at this
time, and probably cared for him in his illness.
Seneca returned to Rome in 31 ce. His father wanted him to begin
a political career, and his aunt’s connections were also useful in
achieving this aim. At some point after his return to Rome — but per-
haps as late as 37 ce, after several more years devoted to study — he
took his first step on to the ladder of the traditional Roman political
career (the cursus). He was appointed as a ‘quaestor’ (a financial
officer), and enrolled in the Senate. It was a comparatively late start
for a political career: Seneca’s peers would have already begun to
3 For more on Stoicism, see ‘Stoicism and Seneca’s Tragedies’, below.
4 Epistle 78. 1 – 2: Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (Penguin Books, 2004),
131.
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x
introduction
climb the ladder in their twenties, while he had spent those years
being ill and studying philosophy.
After his return to Rome Seneca quickly became a well-known
public figure. His success was as much due to his literary and rhet-
orical skills as to his family background. He began writing: we know
that during the reign of Tiberius he wrote the Consolation to Marcia,
a philosophical work addressed to a woman whose son had died.
Seneca puts Marcia’s grief in the context of universal mortality, sug-
gesting that if she can take a larger perspective she may be able to
accept her individual loss. The treatise shows Seneca’s conceptual
and stylistic energy at work even at this early stage of his career.
Seneca became famous as an orator as well as a writer. But the
growing admiration for Seneca among the Roman elite was not
shared by the emperor himself. Gaius Caligula did not like him;
perhaps he was wary of his influence among powerful people. The
Greek historian Dio Cassius tells us that Caligula threatened to force
Seneca to commit suicide, on the grounds that he had pleaded too
well before the Senate. He was spared only because one of Caligula’s
mistresses argued that Seneca was tubercular and likely to die soon
anyway.5 The story may well be false, or at least exaggerated. But
Seneca’s rhetorical fluency does seem to have aroused the annoyance
of Caligula, even if he did not threaten him with death. The Roman
historian Suetonius tells us that the emperor had ‘so much contempt
for more subtle and refined kinds of writing’ that he said of Seneca,
‘then very much in fashion’, that his compositions were ‘mere school
essays’, and that his work was ‘sand without lime’.6 The implication
of the metaphor is that there is no binding agent in Seneca’s rhetoric
to cement all the pointed witticisms together.
In the year 41 ce Caligula was murdered, and Claudius took
over as emperor. Soon after the new ruler’s accession the two sisters
of Caligula who had been in exile, Julia and Agrippina, were allowed
to return to Rome, but some months later Julia was accused of com-
mitting adultery with Seneca. They were tried before the Senate
and sentenced to death, but Claudius altered the sentence to exile.
Seneca was sent to Corsica, where he spent the next eight years.
He had to leave behind his whole family, including his wife and
young son.
5 Dio, Roman History, 59. 19.
6 Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, ‘Caligula’, 53: trans. Catharine Edwards, Oxford
World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 2000), 163.
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introduction
xi
It is not clear whether there was any truth in the accusations. One
of our sources, Cassius Dio, suggests that the charges were trumped
up by Claudius’ wife Messalina, because she was jealous of Julia.